Iwoke up Feb. 15 with a nervous lump in my stomach, questioning whether I should go through with the day’s planned activities and knowing that because it made me feel so shaky, I probably should. It was Challenge Day.

The stories I’d heard from the year before and in the days leading up to Challenge Day, I knew it would be an emotional experience. I’d been told numerous times how “life-changing” it would be and how hard I was going to cry before the day was over.

With those ideas in my head as I entered the cafeteria annex, its windows blocked from outsiders’ eyes with construction paper, I clung to my three close friends who were among the few familiar faces I saw in the crowd.

The knots in my stomach were slowly untied, however, when the Challenge Day facilitators Sister B and Justin introduced themselves. We played a giant game of musical chairs, booty danced with people we’d never met, told each other our most embarrassing moments and told each other the answers to the random questions Sister B posed to the crowd, to break the ice.

From there, the activities became more personal and more effective at “lowering the water line,” as it was put. I sat knee to knee and held hands with a boy I had never seen around campus, and we quietly listened to each other tell about hard times we’d faced in our lives. I went back and forth for two minutes with yet another stranger, completing the phrase: “If you really knew me you’d know …”, both of us sharing secrets as we looked into each other’s eyes. For a normally reserved person like me, it started out uncomfortably but ended up being very freeing.

I sat with my lunch buddy for our 20-minute breather and I wondered how in the world the small, sheltered cafeteria annex could be so radically different from the roaring campus outside. How could I ever have put myself in the position to be exposed and still feel safe? Why were people so open with me and why did they respond to me with understanding and love?

I think it must have been that inside that room we were all in the same position,which, in truth, is the case outside of Challenge Day as well, except that somehow we knew that here we wouldn’t be judged or made fun of. We had allowed ourselves to get lost in the entire experience, which showed us our unmistakable similarities.

The Challenge Day tears I had been warned about came during a “Cross the Line” activity in which we were instructed to cross a red line taped onto the floor if a statement Sister B read out applied to us. I cried because it brought up things I didn’t like to think about, but more so because I saw how much each of us has faced already in our young lives and how I couldn’t explain why it was that way.

It was intensely heartbreaking to see the number of students who had felt unloved, who were made to feel inferior, who couldn’t say they had had real childhoods. Standing face to face with and among my peers on either side of that red line was eye-opening in that it gave me evidence of how much we have the power to affect each other’s lives.

I left school that day wishing that every great lesson I’d learned during Challenge Day would not fade away. I wished I could help people notice how closely we are linked by our own fear of rejection, and how much I don’t want to perpetuate that fear in anyone else’s life.

Mari Robinson is a junior at Castro Valley High School. Columns by area teens appear in this space Mondays.

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